Cincinnati's food identity was forged not in restaurants but in the city's public markets, where German immigrants in the 1850s introduced goetta — a farmer's sausage of steel-cut oats and pork shoulder — and where meatpackers built the slaughterhouse district that earned the city its nickname, Porkopolis. Findlay Market, founded in 1852 and still operating six days a week from its original iron-roofed shed on Race Street, remains the oldest continuously operating public market in Ohio. The stalls that once sold hog jowls and lard now offer Turkish coffee, Somali sambusas, and house-cured bresaola, a reflection of the city's immigrant waves layered across nearly two centuries. Today, a walking food tour Cincinnati operators design moves through Over-the-Rhine, the neighborhood that surrounds Findlay Market and holds the largest collection of Italianate architecture in the United States. Between 2000 and 2020, Over-the-Rhine transformed from a district of vacant storefronts into a corridor of craft breweries, charcuterie counters, and third-wave coffee roasters, anchored by Washington Park's renovated greenspace. The food culture here is granular and specific: Cincinnati-style chili served over spaghetti in three-way, four-way, and five-way configurations; Montgomery Inn's dry-rubbed ribs finished with a vinegar-forward sauce; and goetta, still pressed into loaves and pan-fried until the edges crisp. The culinary walking tours that operate in Cincinnati typically begin at Findlay Market, where vendors have occupied the same family stalls for generations, then move south into the brewery district along Vine Street and Main Street. Rhinegeist Brewery occupies a former bottling plant; Taft's Ale House operates inside a restored church nave with its altar intact. Between tastings, guides contextualize the architecture: the cast-iron facades imported from foundries in Louisville, the mansard roofs modeled after Parisian apartments, the narrow shotgun layouts designed for German laborers who walked to work at the riverfront factories. These tours do not abstract the city's food into a culinary brand; they ground it in the immigrant labor, industrial geography, and economic cycles that shaped what Cincinnati eats and why it eats it that way.